If you're wondering why Saudi Arabia and Israel have united against Al-Jazeera, here's the answer

There are still honourable Israelis who demand a state for the Palestinians; there are well-educated Saudis who object to the crazed Wahabism upon which their kingdom is founded; there are millions of Americans, from sea to shining sea, who do not believe that Iran is their enemy nor Saudi Arabia their friend. But the problem today in both East and West is that our governments are not our friends.

• Robert Fisk 

d.d. 10-08-2017

Theresa May has already suppressed a report so it wouldn’t upset the Saudis. And we wonder why we go to war with the Middle East AFP

When Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite channel has both the Saudis and the Israelis demanding its closure, it must be doing something right. To bring Saudi head-choppers and Israeli occupiers into alliance is, after all, something of an achievement.

But don’t get too romantic about this. When the wealthiest Saudis fall ill, they have been known to fly into Tel Aviv on their private jets for treatment in Israel’s finest hospitals. And when Saudi and Israeli fighter-bombers take to the air, you can be sure they’re going to bomb Shiites – in Yemen or Syria respectively – rather than Sunnis.

And when King Salman – or rather Saudi Arabia’s whizz-kid Crown Prince Mohammad – points the finger at Iran as the greatest threat to Gulf security, you can be sure that Bibi Netanyahu will be doing exactly and precisely the same thing, replacing “Gulf security”, of course, with “Israeli security”. But it’s an odd business when the Saudis set the pace of media suppression only to be supported by that beacon of freedom, democracy, human rights and liberty known in song and legend as Israel, or the State of Israel or, as Bibi and his cabinet chums would have it, the Jewish State of Israel.

So let’s run briefly through the latest demonstration of Israeli tolerance towards the freedom of expression that all of us support, nurture, love, adore, regard as a cornerstone of our democracy, and so on, and so on, and so on. For this week, Ayoob Kara, the Israeli communications minister, revealed plans to take away the credentials of Al Jazeera’s Israeli-based journalists, close its Jerusalem bureau and take the station’s broadcasts from local cable and satellite providers.

This, announced Ayoob Kara – an Israeli Druze (and thus an Arab Likud minister) who is a lifelong supporter of the colonisation by Jews of Israeli-occupied Arab land in the West Bank – would “bring a situation that channels based in Israel will report objectively”. In other words, threaten them. Bring them into line.

Bibi Netanyahu long ago accused Al Jazeera of inciting violence in Jerusalem, especially in its reporting of the recent Jerusalem killings – but since just about every foreign journalist in and outside Israel who has dared to be critical of the state has at one time or another been accused of incitement as well as anti-Semitism and other lies, this is just par for the course.

Personally, I have found Al Jazeera’s reporting from Israel pretty pathetic, its fawning reverence for the state all too painfully illustrated when its Qatar anchorwoman expressed to an Israeli government spokesman live on air her channel’s condolences on the death of Ariel Sharon, the monstrous Israeli ex-defence minister who was held responsible for the massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres of 1982.

Ayoob Kara, however, has actually taken his cue from his fellow Arabs. And he admits it. Israel had to take steps, he said, against “media, which has been determined by almost all Arab countries to actually be a supporter of terror, and we know this for certain”. So the Israelis, it appears, now receive lessons on media freedoms from “Arab countries”. Not just the Saudis, of course, but from “almost all Arab countries” whose unfettered media – one thinks at once of the untrammelled liberal press of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Algeria and yes, “almost” the entire media of the Gulf – are bastions of truth-telling, hard-hitting opponents of authoritarian regimes, constitutionally protected from dictatorial abuse. Forgive the hollow laughter. But is this really how Israel wants to define itself?

Well, yes it is, I suppose. For if an unwritten alliance really exists between Saudi Arabia and Israel, then all options – as US presidents and secretary Hillary Clinton used to say – are “on the table”.

Imprisonment without trial, extrajudicial executions, human rights abuses, corruption, military rule – let’s say this at once: all these characteristics belong to “almost all” Sunni Muslim Arab nations – and to Israel in the lands it occupies. And as for being a “supporter of terror” (I quote Israeli minister Kara again), one must first ask why Sunni Gulf Arabs have exported their fighters – and their money – to the most vicious Sunni Islamists in the Middle East. And then ask why Israel has never bombed these same vile creatures – indeed, ask why Israel has given hospital treatment to wounded fighters from the Sunni al-Nusra – in other words, al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11 – while attacking Shiite Hezbollah and Alawite (Shiite) led-Syria, and threatened to bombard Shiite Iran itself which is a project, I should add, of which Kara himself is all in favour.

Nor must we forget that America’s insane President and his weird regime is also part of the Saudi-Israeli anti-Shiite confederation. Trump’s obscene $350bn arms sales to the Saudis, his fingering of Iran and his hatred of the world’s press and television channels makes him an intimate part of the same alliance. Indeed, when you look at one of Trump’s saner predecessors – George W Bush, who also hated Iran, kowtowed to the Saudis and actually talked to Tony Blair of bombing Al Jazeera’s own headquarters in Qatar, he who made sure the wealthy bin Laden family were flown out of the States after 9/11 – this American-Saudi-Israeli covenant has a comparatively long history.

Being an irrational optimist, there’s an innocent side of my scratched journalistic hide that still believes in education and wisdom and compassion. There are still honourable Israelis who demand a state for the Palestinians; there are well-educated Saudis who object to the crazed Wahhabism upon which their kingdom is founded; there are millions of Americans, from sea to shining sea, who do not believe that Iran is their enemy nor Saudi Arabia their friend. But the problem today in both East and West is that our governments are not our friends. They are our oppressors or masters, suppressors of the truth and allies of the unjust.

Netanyahu wants to close down Al Jazeera’s office in Jerusalem. Crown Prince Mohammad wants to close down Al Jazeera’s office in Qatar. Bush actually did bomb Al Jazeera’s offices in Kabul and Baghdad. Theresa May decided to hide a government report on funding “terrorism”, lest it upset the Saudis – which is precisely the same reason Blair closed down a UK police enquiry into alleged BAE-Saudi bribery 10 years earlier.

And we wonder why we go to war in the Middle East. And we wonder why Sunni Isis exists, un-bombed by Israel, funded by Sunni Gulf Arabs, its fellow Sunni Salafists cosseted by our wretched presidents and prime ministers. I guess we better keep an eye on Al Jazeera – while it’s still around

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/al-jazeera-saudi-arabia-israel-policy-terrorism-isis-iran-prince-mohamed-netanyahu-a7885851.html

'Breakthrough' microchip technology helps heal wounds, nerves and organ damage

Revolutionary technology uses microchip to inject genetic code into body's cells, transforming them into other types

Ben Kentish

d.d. 08-08-2017 


The chip could potentially be used to treat a range of conditions, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Ohio State University

Scientists have invented a “breakthrough” technology they say will help heal wounds, blood vessels, nerves and damaged organs.

The technology, called Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT) uses nanotechnology to turn skin cells into a range of other types of cell that can be used to repair damaged tissues.

The cells are converted by a small microchip, similar in size to a penny, which injects genetic code into skin cells, transforming them into other types of cell.

• READ MORE

New method to 'make aged cells younger' discovered by scientists

The chip is simply placed onto the skin and can begin to create new specialised cells in “less than a second”, scientists said.

The researchers, from Ohio State University, turned skin cells from mice and pigs into blood vessel cells and nerve cells. After a week, the new cells formed new blood vessels and nerve tissue.

In one experiment, a badly damaged mouse leg was saved by the technology creating new blood vessels in tissue that had previously been lacking blood flow.

Another test involved injecting new nerve cells into a mouse’s brain to enable it to recover from a stroke.

“This is difficult to imagine, but it is achievable, successfully working about 98 per cent of the time,” said Dr. Chandan Sen, one of the joint leaders of the study. “With this technology, we can convert skin cells into elements of any organ with just one touch. This process only takes less than a second and is non-invasive, and then you're off. The chip does not stay with you, and the reprogramming of the cell starts.”

The technology could see cells grown on a human patient’s skin and then injected into their body to treat conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimers, nerve damage and strokes.

It is the body’s own cells that are being converted, so the immune system does not attack them and therefore there is no need for immuno-suppressant drugs.

Some treatments already involve converting cells in laboratory conditions before injecting them back into the patient, but this is the first time cells have been reprogrammed within the body.

Scientists said the procedure is non-invasive and does not require a laboratory, meaning it could be used in hospitals and GP surgeries. It simply involves the chip being placed on the skin and a light electrical current applied, which patients barely feel.

The research was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“By using our novel nanochip technology, injured or compromised organs can be replaced,” said Dr Sen. “We have shown that skin is a fertile land where we can grow the elements of any organ that is declining,” 

Trials to test the technology in humans are being planned for next year...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/microchip-tech-skin-cells-heal-wounds-nerves-organ-damage-treatment-breakthrough-ohio-state-a7882981.html

Why the White House Is Reading Greek History

The Trump team is obsessing over Thucydides, the ancient historian who wrote a seminal tract on war.

By MICHAEL CROWLEY

 

June 21, 2017

The Trump White House isn’t known as a hot spot for Ivy League intellectuals. But last month, a Harvard academic slipped into the White House complex for an unusual meeting. Graham Allison, an avuncular foreign policy thinker who served under Reagan and Clinton, was paying a visit to the National Security Council, where he briefed a group of staffers on one of history’s most studied conflicts—a brutal war waged nearly 2,500 years ago, one whose lessons still resonate, even in the administration of a president who doesn’t like to read.

The subject was America’s rivalry with China, cast through the lens of ancient Greece. The 77-year-old Allison is the author of a recent book based on the writings of Thucydides, the ancient historian famous for his epic chronicle of the Peloponnesian War between the Greek states of Athens and Sparta. Allison cites the Greek scholar’s summation of why the two powers fought: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” He warns that the same dynamic could drive this century’s rising empire, China, and the United States into a war neither wants. Allison calls this the “Thucydides Trap,” and it’s a question haunting some very important people in the Trump administration, particularly as Chinese officials arrive Wednesday for “diplomatic and security dialogue” talks between Washington and Beijing designed, in large part, to avoid conflict between the world’s two strongest nations.

It might seem curious that an ancient Greek would cast a shadow over a meeting between a group of diplomats and generals from America and Asia. Most Americans probably don’t know Thucydides from Mephistopheles. But the Greek writer is a kind of demigod to international relations theorists and military historians, revered for his elegant chronicle of one of history’s most consequential wars, and his timeless insights into the nature of politics and warfare. The Yale University historian Donald Kagan calls Thucydides’ account “a source of wisdom about the behavior of human beings under the enormous pressures imposed by war, plague, and civil strife.”

Thucydides is especially beloved by the two most influential figures on Trump’s foreign policy team. National security adviser H.R. McMaster has called Thucydides’ work an “essential” military text, taught it to students and quoted from it in speeches and op-eds. 

Defense Secretary James Mattis is also fluent in Thucydides’ work: “If you say to him, ‘OK, how about the Melian Dialogue?’ he could tell you exactly what it is,” Allison says—referring to one particularly famous passage. 

When former Defense Secretary William Cohen introduced him at his confirmation hearing, Cohen said Mattis was likely the only person present “who can hear the words ‘Thucydides Trap’ and not have to go to Wikipedia to find out what it means.”

That’s not true in the Trump White House, where another Peloponnesian War aficionado can be found in the office of chief strategist Steve Bannon. A history buff fascinated with grand conflict, Bannon once even used “Sparta”—one of the most militarized societies history has known—as a computer password. (“He talked a lot about Sparta,” his former Hollywood writing partner, Julia Jones, told The Daily Beast. An unnamed former colleague recalled for the New Yorker Bannon’s “long diatribes” about the Peloponnesian War.)

In an August 2016 article for his former employer, Breitbart News, Bannon likened the conservative media rivalry between Breitbart and Fox News to the Peloponnesian War, casting Breitbart as the disciplined warrior state of Sparta challenging a decadently Athenian Fox. There’s also NSC spokesman Michael Anton, a student of the classics who owns two copies of Thucydides’ fabled work. (“The acid test for me is: Do you read the Hobbes translation?” he says. “If you’ve read that translation, you’ve got my respect.”)

That’s a lot of Greek history for any administration, never mind one led by our current tweeter-in-chief. “Most people in Washington have almost no historical memory or grounding,” Allison says. “Mattis reads a lot of books. McMaster can quote more central lines from more books than anybody I know. And Bannon reads a huge amount of history. So I think this is an unusual configuration.” Allison also left a copy of his new book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?for Anton, in whose West Wing office it now resides. Another copy went to Matthew Pottinger, the NSC’s Asia director, who invited Allison to address his colleagues last month.

As for President Donald Trump himself, there’s no evidence he’s taken any interest in an Athenian historian born almost 500 years before Jesus Christ. (Not that Trump has anything against Greece: “I love the Greeks. Oh, do I love them,” Trump said at a Greek Independence Day event in March. “Don't forget, I come from New York—that’s all I see is Greeks, they are all over the place.”)

But Trump might approve of the ancient Greek scholar’s sway over his senior strategists. Thucydides is considered a father of the “realist” school of international relations, which holds that nations act out of pragmatic self-interest with little regard for ideology, values or morality. “He was the founder of realpolitik,” Allison says. This view is distilled in the famous Melian Dialogue, a set of surrender talks that feature the cold-eyed conclusion that right and wrong means nothing in the face of raw strength. “In the real world, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must,” concludes an Athenian ambassador—a Trumpian statement 2½ millennia before The Donald’s time.

The conservative military historian and Thucydides expert Victor Davis Hanson knows McMaster, Mattis and Bannon to varying degrees, and says they can apply useful lessons about the Peloponnesian War to a fracturing world. “I think their knowledge of Thucydides might remind them that the world works according to perceived self-interest, not necessarily idealism as expressed in the General Assembly of the U.N.,” Hanson says. “That does not mean they are cynical as much as they are not naive.”

In recent months, both Mattis and McMaster have publicly cited Thucydides’ diagnosis of the three factors that drive nations to conflict. “People fight today for the same reasons Thucydides identified 2,500 years ago: fear, honor and interest,” McMaster wrote in a July 2013 New York Times op-ed that argued for bringing historical perspective to military challenges. Mattis also endorsed the universal power of “fear, honor and interest” during his confirmation hearing (prompting Maine Senator Angus King to announce that he had stored the quote in his phone).

Mattis was answering another senator’s somewhat puzzled question about the meaning of the ‘Thucydides Trap,” raised earlier in the hearing by Cohen. The Marine general wouldn’t endorse the theory that the U.S. and China are on a collision course. But he did say that “we’re going to have to manage that competition between us and China,” and that the U.S. would have to “maintain a very strong military so our diplomats are always engaging from a position of strength when we deal with a rising power.”

Kori Schake, a former George W. Bush State Department official at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who co-wrote a 2016 book with Mattis, has spoken with Mattis about Thucydides, whose history, she says, gives the Pentagon chief “a rich appreciation for the way democratic societies can talk themselves into folly and destruction, as Athens (the rising power) does. It illustrates for him the danger of action without careful analysis of consequences.”

A U.S. military conflict with China would be a global disaster. But while Allison believes it is entirely possible, he does not call it inevitable. His book identifies 16 historical case studies in which an established power like Sparta (or the United States) was confronted with a fast-rising rival like Athens (or China). Twelve of those cases led to war. Four were resolved peacefully. Allison hopes that readers—including officials in the Trump administration—can draw from the latter examples. “I am writing this history to help people not make mistakes,” he says.

Allison’s theory, which he first promoted in 2015, has caught the attention of the Chinese themselves. During a visit to Seattle that September, Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the gloomy prospect of a collision course, saying there is “no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world,” while adding that if major nations “time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.”

If Trump really is confronted with a historical trap, it remains unclear how he might escape it. Senior Trump officials complain that the U.S. has accommodated China’s rise for decades, hoping that integration into the Western economic system would alter its Communist values. That hasn't happened. But it’s not clear how Trump might try to reverse the trend. He hasn’t followed through on his provocative campaign pledges to declare China a currency manipulator and impose huge tariffs on its exports, instead forging a chummy relationship with Xi that has so far focused on bringing Chinese pressure to bear on North Korea.

Some China experts say Allison’s theory has implications that Trump isn’t likely to countenance. “If you’re worried about the Thucydides Trap, then you try to adopt a set of policies that reduce the threat of confrontation, and ultimately seek to reassure China,” says Evan Medeiros, a former NSC Asia director for the Obama White House. “That’s very different from the hard-core realist view of the world, especially with people like Bannon.” (In his 2016 article on the Fox-Breitbart rivalry, Bannon writes that Thucydides “would warn” Fox executives that their failure to take Breitbart’s rise more seriously “will only accelerate Fox’s fall.”)

Trump’s strategy is still a work in progress. On Tuesday, he tweeted that China’s assistance on the North Korea problem “has not worked out. At least I know China tried!” He did not explain what the consequences might be, though they will presumably be a topic of conversation when Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meet senior Chinese diplomatic and military officials in Washington this week.

Thucydides may not be part of that conversation. Allison’s theory is just one application of the Greek historian’s insight. There are others, as Schake notes—including lessons focused more on a nation’s internal threats than on external foes.

“Most of all, Thucydides’ history is a story of the devastation that political disunion brings to a vibrant republic,” she says, “something Secretary Mattis often talks about and every American should worry about.”

https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5809630455045008997#editor/target=post;postID=6017763844876985876